Akshay Raj Singh Rathore’s satirical works highlight the diminishing importance of farmers in contemporary society
Born in the zamindar family of Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, Akshay Raj Singh Rathore could have grown up to be the quintessential Rajput — proud of his heritage and making most of the luxuries of life. Instead, the 36-year-old chose to turn his gaze inwards to create a body of highly introspective and satirical works that question a farmer’s diminishing importance in contemporary society.
Rathore’s first solo show, titled Impotent Rage at Gallery Espace, is an exhibition of mixed media installations. “I grew up in an atmosphere dominated by upper caste politics and witnessed the deterioration of rural social structure, which was primarily a result of the failure in implementing land reforms post liberalisation. Also, many other influences made me aware of the forces and issues at stake within contemporary societies traversed by complex evolutions,” says Rathore.
His interactions with people have served as the foundation for his works. He recalls his interaction with the the Bundelkhandi domestic help in Delhi and says, “I could see how people were exploited in their villages, uprooted to find work in Delhi where their conditions had deteriorated further.”
In 2010, Rathore attended the Sandarbh Residency in Partapur in Rajasthan, where his performative work, asking people to leave their footprints on a disputed street being claimed by two religious communities, questioned land ownership and its ramifications. His residency in El Salavador in 2011, where he witnessed a struggle over “fertile land”, reinforced questions about freedom and power.
“This show is a culmination of all those experiences. It is a not a single-themed show. It delves into the hidden angst in rural India, which is invisible, even impotent. It also is about the unabashed celebration of masculinity as seen through power structures and their violent patterns. It’s about commercialisation and its impact,” says Rathore, who is now based in Paris.
His works take from research in different fields such as history, anthropology, mass media communication, agrarian studies and political sciences. They explore contemporary societal complexities through dialectics — developed/primitive, organic/inorganic, democratic/undemocratic, simplicity/complexity — to present the picture based around the future of our civilisation and its fertile capacity to overcome the present impotent rage it is caught in.
Civil/Uncivil, for instance, is an installation in clay sequenced into three stages: the origin — a lump of raw clay, the moulding — a functional brick and third, the brick’s broken down form, metaphorically questioning the implementation of a system that forces people into following a rigid and edgy structure, whereas the original, organic counters are lost. “It’s a debate between what is civil and uncivil. It’s textural…it’s about the ‘earth’ we inhabit and how we consider ‘poor farmers’ to be uncivilised though they are the ones who are reason of the land’s fertility.”
Bull and Bullocks explores the imagery and compares two animals — the masculine bull and its functional version, the bullock. Included with the drawings of the animals, is material, text and photographs about the process of castration that renders a bull “functional” for human purpose. The imposing bull is a symbol of emasculation, castration, power and masculinity, while the bullock is a docile beast of burden whose balls have been scientifically crushed as a calf for domestication. The work has imageries of patented castration, an ancestral know-how entering the market economy, an old photograph depicting one of India’s first satellites being brought to the launch pad on a bullock cart, confronting two realities, where space age and the primitive meet.
Obituary is the portrait of a Kachhi farmer from Vidisha — Tikaram, standing alone, staring at a wall of seeds from his farm. “Tikaram belongs to a caste of farmers who had mastered the best technique of utilising land fertility. The work is a tribute to the ‘death’ of this sort of ‘wise’ farming,” explains the artist. Accompanying the drawing are sets of photos of seeds taken at Tikaram’s garden and its unique metamorphosis processes, following natural rhythms.
Food In Hand is a series of photographs of scooping out food grains taken at various local mandis and regional haats. The collection is a visual journey through weekly markets in rural India exploring the diversity of food they offer. “With the rise in packaged food, we have lost the sensation of touching, smelling and ‘feeling’ what we eat. Packaging has rendered our diversity meaningless,” shares Rathore.
The title work Impotent Range – an installation of paintings, drawings, photographs, text and found material — uses images of masculinity from different cultures to speak about the symbolic castration of a humane philosophy of life.